Out of Obscurity: Mormon Feminism in the Digital Age

Abstract

Mormon feminists have face over 40 years of fear of excommunication, the loss of family and social relationships for their advocacy for gender equality in the LDS Church. The history of punishment has repeatedly pushed mormon feminist conversations underground, spoken only in small safe circles, but the creation of the blog Feminist Mormon Housewives in 2004, began to bring the discussion into the digital, and into a public space. The last 10 years have produced numerous online communities related to Mormon feminism. In the last two years these groups have moved from online discussion to offline activism, including wearing pants to church day, asking for women to pray in all church meetings, and public calls for female ordination. Many Mormon feminists continue to face formal and informal discipline This presentation will address last three years of refining methodologies and research methods to capture the complexity of online Mormon feminism. We will address how we first identified the the community using snowball sampling methods, and how we have evolved random sampling methodologies. We will address how we have worked to establish legitimacy within the community. We will discuss how we gathered and have analyzed historical digital documents. We will discuss how we have tried to expand existing sociological understanding of conservative non political religious social movements.

Keywords: Methods, Digital, Mormonism, Social Movements